Other People’s Children: Writer and director Rebecca Zlotowski on the question at the centre of the film

It’s a question that plagues many women and men approaching their 40s – can your life still have meaning if you don’t have kids?

Other People's Children Picture: Palace Films

French filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski was going to make a very different movie to the award-winning Other People’s Children.

She had circled an adaptation of a novel about a man who could no longer rise to the occasion and distracted himself with young women. It would have been about friendships between men and women, and a deconstruction of masculinity.

“The thing I usually do with cinema is go out and have drinks and just mingle with people and talk,” Zlotowski said. “And then the pandemic happened and I was stuck by myself in my apartment with my husband and my husband’s kids.”

Her own situation inspired the premise behind Other People’s Children, which stars Virginie Efira as Rachel, a 40-year-old woman who meets a man who has a four-year-old daughter. She soon starts to really become involved in young Leila’s life but without the certainty that the relationship would last.

“I felt that the story was literally the most romantic thing in my life — that I was falling in love with the kids of my boyfriend, and I knew that maybe some day I would have to say ‘bye’,” Zlotowski revealed.

Virginie Efira in Other People's Children. Picture: Palace Films

The filmmaker, whose previous films include Grand Central and Belle Epine, said she had to choose between hiding herself behind an adaptation or forging ahead with a personally exposing story.

“Let’s do the woman’s portrait and see what happens! And the film was written like that.

“I’m always exposed to the world when I make a film. There’s a proverb my father mentions all the time, which is ‘the higher you climb, the more you expose your arse’. So when you make a film, when you’re deep-hearted like or the films I make, of course you expose yourself. It’s tough.

“My crew has known me for a long time. The same director of photography, the same producer, and they were reading the script and they were like, ‘OK, so she’s telling very personal stuff’.

“I’m a control freak and very cerebral and not easily sentimental but it was tough for me. And that’s the way it should be with this film.”

That Zlotowski described herself as “not sentimental” is an interesting insight into Other People’s Children, because the movie is coursing with deep emotion. The character, Rachel, is grappling with a question that many women, and men, have asked as they approached their 40s – if I don’t have children, will my life still have the same meaning?

Zlotowski’s film explores the question through Rachel’s journey, and whether she can accept fulfilment of a life teeming with significance.

Rebecca Zlotowski’s film was inspired by her own life.

Zlotowski, born in France to parents from Israel, also looked at the concept through the lens of her Jewish heritage. “I can connect with the fact that for a Jewish woman, when she doesn’t have children, you re-question the idea of transmitting things. How can you make the transmission an idea and not biology?

“In the film, someone says to her, I’ve not forgotten you, you won’t be forgotten. This is also like the Jewish thing, it’s about transmitting and not being forgotten.

“Maybe I was scared, as a woman. There are many women around me who do not have children, and it’s fine. This movie was about a woman who will never have a kid but won’t be forgotten either.

“You have a legacy. We have to choose the legacy and the way we transmit that legacy. Making a film is a legacy. Writing is a legacy.

“It’s something we need to struggle for because it’s like people don’t ask the question of their existence. You are born, you find someone, you get married and then you have children. What happens when it doesn’t happen like that?”

That’s the question Zlotowski and Other People’s Children is most interested in.

Other People’s Children is in cinemas from July 6 with advance screenings on June 30, July 1 and July 2

The writer travelled to Paris as a guest of Unifrance